The English jurists, following the colonisation of India, tried in vain to answer the question “Who is the owner of the land?”. These conditions of collective ownership persisted for millennia, and, as Marx noted, in his writings on the British in India, those relations were so stagnant and stable that they remained like that until some external intervention disturbed and disrupted them, creating the possibility of change.
“The Turks were the first to introduce a sort of feudal ownership of land in the countries conquered by them in the Orient. As far back as the heroic epoch, Greece made its entry into history with a system of social estates which was itself evidently the product of a long but unknown prehistory; even there, however, the land was mainly cultivated by independent peasants; the larger domains of the nobles and tribal chiefs were the exception, and they disappeared soon after. Italy was brought under cultivation chiefly by peasants; when, in the final period of the Roman Republic, the great complexes of estates, the latifundia, displaced the small peasants and replaced them by slaves, they also replaced tillage by stockraising, and, as Pliny already realized, brought Italy to ruin (latifundia Italiam perdidere). During the Middle Ages, peasant farming was predominant throughout Europe (especially in bringing virgin soil into cultivation)”. (p 225-6)
Whether these peasants paid feudal or other rents to landlords, Engels notes, is not relevant, because unlike a slave or serf, they did so as free peasants.
“The colonists from Friesland, Lower Saxony, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, who brought under cultivation the land east of the Elbe which had been wrested from the Slavs, did this as free peasants under very favourable rentals, and not at all under “some form of corvée”.” (p 226)
In North America, the large tracts of land were, generally, not cultivated by the Native American tribes, who remained as hunter-gatherers, because of the facility of doing so. Cultivation on a large-scale, arises only with European settlement, but, here, again, there is no support for Duhring's thesis.
“In North America, by far the largest portion of the land was opened for cultivation by the labour of free farmers, while the big landed proprietors of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could grow only firs, so that the cultivation of cotton was forced further and further west.” (p 226)
Again, as Marx had set out in Capital III, it is only with the subsequent application of capitalistic methods, and its use of science and technology, that these “rapacious” methods that destroy the soil and natural environment, were ended and reversed. The two sources of real wealth, as Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, are Nature and Labour. Capitalism relies on both, and, in its contradictory process of development, is led both to destroy and to conserve them. At times, it overworks and destroys both the environment and labour-power, when they are in excess supply, but, then, is also forced to introduce its own regulation, to prevent such destruction, as bringing, also, a destruction of its own capacity to produce and realise profits. As Marx had put it in his Preface to Capital I, the Factory Acts were as much the product of industrial capitalism as the spinning machine. And Engels, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, makes the same point.
“The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages...
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.”
Forward To Part 3
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